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moving to digital

Proofing

Printing paper to be used within the industry of melamine boards means large-scale production.

Melamine market is a huge market. The average production is around 3 million square meters per month. Printing such a huge volume is something that ought to be developed within an industrial environment. Therefore, the impact of innovation in this field is very relevant. Nevertheless, there are issues related to this large-scale production, which represent an added difficulty. The printer ought to work nonstop, but at the same time the quality control needs measurements and new design should enter into production every day. Interrupting the production for any of those reasons would be very expensive. Because of this, proofing is needed to control the quality of the color.

SEISTAG designed the proofing technology for PRINTODECO Project. The technological Company proposed a technical solution similar to the one used for large-scale offset production, but this time used not to control an analogical printing device, but a large-scale digital printer. Proofing means printing trials in a small printer in order to keep the big one running nonstop and error free. It is very usual for large-scale production. It is also typical when color is an important element in the image.

Proofing needs profiling the industrial printing device. This is done in three steps. The first step is to measure the real color produced by the printer. Then to compare it with the theoretical color of the original image. Finally, establishing a mathematical relationship between the coordinates of the color to be printed and the coordinates of the printed color. A line describes that relation, and that is the reason why it is called profile. Moreover, as there are four channels of color (Cian, Magenta, Yellow, and Black), four profiles are needed.

Once the industrial partner has been described by means of its profiles, it is possible to print at lab scale as if it were the industrial printer. Note that the lab scale printer should be able to reproduce more colors than the industrial printer. Otherwise, the lab-scale printer would not be able to reproduce the results of the industrial device: a high-quality printer at the laboratory is necessary. Luckily TORCULO owns a machine that suits this need. This enabled proofing during the PRINTODECO Project, which was a technical process to ensure quality steered by SEISTAG within PRINTDECO Project.

PRINTODECO volume 1

PRINTODECO partners present a book showing the advances of the Project. It was printed on September 2017 in full colour, with 77 pages and 43 pictures. The new book includes the project explanation, the presentation of the companies and news on the Project evolution from April 2016 to July 20017. It resumes the execution of Project during this period.

The book describes four Spanish Companies which participate in PRINTODECO Project: TORCULO, SEISTAG, LOSAN and LOGISIETE. The publication resumes the work done during first period of the Project, starting from the management of coordination of effort amount all the partners to ensure the effective operation of the project and ending the dissemination and the exploitation of project results.

The book includes the information about 17 project meetings and shows PRINTODECO results in the field of image customization and colour management. It also deals with trends and international market opportunities. Finally, the publication of PRINTODECO project describes the possibilities to innovate in terms of surface design.

The book will be presented at Brussels meeting to be held on 19th of October 2017. This is a meeting within COSME networking event, which is focused on “teaming up for success”.

ensuring quality

Ensuring quality

Digital production of melamine boards should accomplish the standard quality of boards produced by means of rotogravure printing. Therefore, a quality control ought to be stablished in two different processes. From one hand, the digital capture of a physical motive should be as good as possible. From the other, the printing should reproduce precisely the colours of the digital motive.

Within the first’s months of 2017, PRINTODECO partners have reached a process for digital capture of physical designs. The process has been developed at lab scale and is suitable for industrial scale up. This is possible thanks to the use of algorithms and rules suitable to any design. Those algorithms and rules might be ran over any design providing a automatically a digital image with high quality and accuracy.

In order to check the accuracy of the process for digital capture, it has been tested under UGRA-FOGRA standards. CIElab coordinates of the original motive and the digital capture have been contrasted. The result is a value for colour deviation “delta e” under 4. The high accuracy added to an automatic workflow makes possible for small melamine board producers to pass from traditional printing to digital printing self-production of designs.